B&T publishes online numbers for first time, leaving AdNews as lone audit holdout

Communications industry title B&T has become the third publication in the sector to have its online audience audited, leaving AdNews as the only major masthead not to be independently verified.

According to today’s data from the Audited Media Association of Australia, B&T delivered 147,606 page impressions during December, just behind creative agency title Campaign Brief which had 184,284 page impressions.

In the new numbers, Mumbrella also led the market on average daily unique browsers, which was 10,278. This was followed by B&T, published by The Misfits Media Company, on 2,644 and Campaign Brief on 2,511.

On total sessions for the month, B&T was on 91,214, Campaign Brief 102,303 and Mumbrella 375,129.

Mumbrella was in the first wave of titles to be audited when the Audit Bureaux of Australia began to offer the online service in 2009. Campaign Brief followed in 2010, while B&T joined late last year.

As well as AdNews, smaller online titles such as Marketing Mag and CMO also do not audit.

In the wider market, the latest AMAA numbers showed that of all audited titles, Caradvice.com.au delivered the most page impressions for December, with 8,059,369 for the month.

This was followed by Pedestrian.tv with 5,869,389 impressions.

Australian Womens Weekly, the only major consumer female title to be audited, delivered 2,074,390 page impressions.

B&T’s sister title Travel Weekly also joined, with an average of 1,070 daily unique browsers in December and 97,553 monthly page impressions.

Who would have thought that the Australian Anthroposophic Medicine Association and/or the Australian Arabic Medical Association would have been so interested as to audit the media trade press websites.

“In the new numbers, Mumbrella also led the market on average daily unique browsers, which was 10,278. This was followed by B&T, published by The Misfits Media Company, on 2,644 and Campaign Brief on 2,511.”

The industry ditched monthly uniques as a reliable number a good while ago. If somebody tries to sell you that, don’t trust them – it probably means they aren’t audited.

But just to clarify, the industry dumped monthly unique browsers (i.e. from a web traffic audit, or GA, Omniture etc) as they overstate reality by several orders of magnitude.

Average daily unique browsers was a more acceptable cohort as it was only overstating by single-digit to low double digits percentage wise. I suspect that this may have blown out further with the increase in smartphone usage but I don’t t have the data to hand to quantify it.

At the same time the industry also endorsed the Unique Audience metric, which was generated as a hybrid measure utilising tagged traffic data and the Nielsen panel.

Panels will always understate online audience because they can’t get sample in public places, universities, government, banking and defence institutions etc. Conversely server-based data will always overstate online audience because of device duplication, cookie deletion etc. The hybrid system uses the traffic counts of each website to establish the quantum of usage, then uses the panel to convert that usage to audience data based on the usage patterns observed in the panel.

I also note that it says ‘monthly website visitors’. Is that unique? Is it cumulative? Is it average daily visitors?

In my experience every publisher quotes the biggest number they can find. One thing that came out of the agreement to standardise on ‘monthly unique audience’ (which of course will be much larger than the average daily audience) was that any media buyer worth their salt would see that non-standard definitions were being quoted and such claims would generally not be considered as part of the negotiation or buying process.

B & T – dead within 2 years… Mumbrealla has a chance if they stop bleeding ….as for Ad News, twas always worth a skim through over an espresso on Monday morning – unless they had an article about me….. as a game!, B&T and Ad News should have been shut down years ago…weekly, fortnightly, monthly, bi-monthly – neither set-up understood how to reliquish ad revenue for audience engagement…. At least Mumbreall puts a foot forward………

The AMAA provides audited web analytics for niche publisher websites, as per this article. I think what is not being acknowledged in comments here, or perhaps some are not aware, that many niche publishers do not have traffic at high enough levels to be properly represented in panel data and hence need to use tagged traffic data. If a site is too small, or too niche, it may well not be picked up by a panel, so these smaller sites often cannot really benefit from a hybrid platform as they will often fall below the acceptable level of traffic to obtain Unique Audience data. UB’s are valid as census based web traffic measurement, albeit not providing the same level of detailed data as a hybrid platform.
The AMAA service is designed to assist smaller sites to provide a credible, audited traffic number for their websites, that can then be utilised to benchmark them against competitors in their set.
John (Grono) you are correct that there are limitations with GA (or Omniture) data as due to the varying nature of how they may be set up site by site, comparing GA figures from one publisher to another is pointless. Hence the AMAA’s service is designed to ensure that the implementation, interpretation and reporting of web analytic data is standardised across all participating publishers.
Note: the acronym for the industry verification body, the Audited Media Association of Australia, is AMAA not AAMA as reported here.